The Dave Gerhardt Show

Exit Five
  • 4.6 (46)
  • MARKETING
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Conversations about marketing and business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, Former CMO). Join the top community for B2B marketers at exitfive.com

  1. 16H AGO

    How to Do Better Email Marketing

    #312 | Jess Lytle (Head of Marketing at Exit Five) hosts a roundtable with a group of email experts on what’s actually working in email, SMS, and in-app messaging right now. They dig into AI’s impact on the inbox, how to sound human when everyone’s using the same tools, and why relevance beats volume. The group also breaks down how to personalize without being creepy, what to do with “lurkers” who never click but still convert, and how to build messaging that survives the AI slop era. It’s a sharp look at how B2B marketers can cut through the noise, earn attention, and actually get people to respond. Timestamps (00:17) - — Jess welcomes everyone (02:30) - — Why email and messaging aren’t dead… bad messaging is (05:58) - — How AI changed the inbox and why standing out is harder than ever (06:34) - — Why human senders beat brand senders in email (10:03) - — Writing emails like you were invited into someone’s personal space (12:18) - — Balancing stakeholder requests vs. what your audience actually wants (15:28) - — Real talk on AI personalization, enrichment, and where it actually works (21:33) - — Subject lines, preview text, and how people really decide what to open (23:08) - — Email stories and empathy-driven content that outperform (29:03) - — SMS, in-app, and email orchestration: what to use when (36:20) - — Measuring impact when email is assist, not hero (44:20) - — The future: AI-driven workflows, data challenges, and what’s coming (53:00) - — Favorite tools (Claude, NotebookLM, etc.) and how people use them Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/ *** Today's episode is brought to you by Knak. Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time. It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience. But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.  That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks. Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

    1h 4m

  2. 4D AGO

    Five Marketing Principles That Matter More Than AI

    #311: Dave goes solo this week (his decision, he said give me the mic; but Dan is also on him about podcast downloads around the holidays) with a quick November breakdown from real life - recapping the Exit Five team trip to Arizona, a big leadership update at the company, and covering five timeless marketing principles that matter more than ever (if you care about fighting AI slop). He also talks about recovering from hip surgery (everyone’s been asking how old he is), what he’s been reading, and a Thanksgiving food debate. Timestamps (00:00) - - Intro + the sunglasses bit (04:08) - - Getting back into podcasting + November setup (05:38) - - The 5 timeless marketing principles (14:28) - - How to apply those principles in real marketing (15:38) - - Exit Five team trip to Arizona (17:28) - - Why in-person time matters (21:20) - - Dave’s hip surgery and recovery (23:50) - - What he read and watched in November (27:20) - - The Thanksgiving overrated/underrated debate (29:40) - - Big news: Dan promoted to CEO and what’s next for Exit Five Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/ *** Today's episode is brought to you by Knak. Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time. It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience. But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.  That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks. Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

    38 min

  3. DEC 8

    How to be Irreplaceable in B2B Marketing (with Josh Lowman)

    #310 Category Creation | In this episode, Dave Gerhardt digs in with Josh Lowman, Founder & CEO of Gold Front, to unpack what “category creation” actually takes, why most companies get it wrong, and how the best brands win by owning a spot in the customer’s mind. They get into the four real paths to category leadership, the trap of “fake” category design, why vibe and soul still beat spreadsheets, and how personal development quietly powers great marketing. If you’re building a B2B brand and trying to stand out in a market that feels painfully same-same, this one hits exactly where you’re stuck. Timestamps (00:00) - – Dave’s Intro (03:22) - – Why Category Creation Got So Noisy (07:40) - – The Real Goal: Becoming Irreplaceable (12:26) - – How Customers Actually Form Categories (16:55) - – The Four Paths to Category Leadership (23:13) - – The Trap of “Fake” Category Design (28:56) - – Product Reality vs. Marketing Narrative (35:32) - – Why Vibe, Soul, and Taste Still Win (41:46) - – Community as a Differentiator (46:23) - – Josh on Therapy, Mindset, and Creative Clarity (52:15) - – Final Takeaways for B2B Marketers Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/ *** Today's episode is brought to you by Knak. Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time. It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience. But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.  That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks. Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

    1h 1m

  4. DEC 4

    How to Make Your Product Positioning Impossible to Ignore with April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy)

    #309 Product Positioning | This episode is from a Drive 2025 (our annual Exit Five event) session with April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy). April pulls from working with 300+ tech companies to unpack the real patterns behind winning positioning from calling out competitors’ nonsense to teaching buyers what actually matters, avoiding category-creation traps, and fixing the sales messes that weak positioning creates. It’s sharp, funny, brutally honest, and basically a crash course in how to make your product unmistakably different in a market full of noise. PS. Want to join us at Drive 2026? Head over to exitfive.com/drive to join the waitlist for Drive 2026 and be the first to know when tickets go on sale. Timestamps (00:00) - – Why Positioning Breaks (03:20) - – Teaching Buyers to Spot Competitor BS (06:48) - – Turning Differentiators into Real Value (10:26) - – The Trap of Overthinking Categories (14:13) - – Choosing Your Go-To-Market Before Your Positioning (18:50) - – Building a Story Only You Can Tell (23:18) - – When Great Storytelling Backfires (28:53) - – Positioning Multi-Product Companies (32:34) - – When and Why to Reposition (36:22) - – Bringing It All Together in Sales Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/ *** Today's episode is brought to you by Knak. Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time. It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience. But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.  That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks. Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

    56 min

  5. DEC 1

    How To Create Urgency, Build Pipeline, and Make Outbound Work (with Jen Allen-Knuth, Founder of DemandJen)

    #308 Sales Alignment | In this session from Drive 2025 titled “Building Pipeline in the Shiny Object Era”, Jen Allen Knuth unpacks why deals stall even when your product is objectively better, how the explosion of shiny tools and AI noise is making it worse, and why most teams are unintentionally fueling the problem with me-centric messaging. Jen shares the two zero-dollar exercises every team should run to quantify how much pipeline they’re losing today, align sales and marketing around the true blocker, and rebuild outbound messaging that creates curiosity. PS. Want to join us at Drive 2026? Head over to exitfive.com/drive to join the waitlist for Drive 2026 and be the first to know when tickets go on sale. Timestamps (00:00) - – Dave’s Intro (03:34) - – Jen’s Story & Why She’s Here (06:24) - – The Real Enemy: Buyer Status Quo (10:31) - – The Shiny Object Era (14:31) - – How Status Quo Kills Deals (22:01) - – The Close-Lost Audit (29:30) - – The “We” Problem in Outbound (32:15) - – The Raincoat Example & Messaging Shift Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/ *** Today's episode is brought to you by Knak. Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time. It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience. But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.  That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks. Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

    49 min

  6. NOV 27

    Should You Invest in Community?

    #307 Building Community | In this episode Dave joined Ali Orlando Wert (Director of Content Marketing & Brand at Databox) on their podcast called Move the Needle. She did an interview with Dave focused on community building. They cover how Exit Five grew 80 percent by operating more like a startup than a Slack group. Dave gets into the truth of building community, why most companies should not launch one, how to measure brand without losing your mind, and why AI has everyone simultaneously energized and spiraling. Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/ *** Today's episode is brought to you by Knak. Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time. It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience. But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.  That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks. Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

    40 min

  7. NOV 24

    What’s Working Right Now in B2B Marketing - Live from Drive 2025 with Sylvia LePoidevin, Trinity Nguyen, and Natalie Taylor

    #306 Executive Insights | This episode was recorded live at our annual event, Drive 2025. I hosted Sylvia LePoidevin (CMO, Kandji), Trinity Nguyen (CMO, UserGems), and Natalie Taylor (Head of Marketing, Capsule) for a leadership panel breaking down what’s working in B2B marketing. They get into events that reliably create pipeline, outbound that still converts, media plays LLMs keep citing, and the tactics they’ve stopped running (like generic webinars that no one shows up for). Want to come to Drive next year? Head over to exitfive.com/drive to join the waitlist for Drive 2026 and be the first to know when tickets go on sale. Timestamps (00:00) - – Intro + Drive 2025 context (02:47) - – Meet the speakers: Sylvia, Trinity, Natalie (04:39) - – The one thing each leader refuses to give up (04:50) - – How Capsule turns events into their #1 pipeline channel (08:53) - – Why outbound still works (and how UserGems does it) (13:46) - – How Kandji built a media property that LLMs actually cite (18:12) - – Plays they stopped doing (blogs, generic content, virtual thought leadership) (25:56) - – Playing offense: Shark Tank Day and GTM alignment (31:20) - – Team wide alignment strategies that drive revenue Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/ *** Today's episode is brought to you by Knak. Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time. It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience. But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.  That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks. Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

    51 min

  8. NOV 20

    The Case for Influencer Marketing in B2B with Brianna Doe (Founder at Verbatim)

    #305 Influencer Marketing | This episode is a live session from Drive 2025 with Brianna Doe, where she breaks down why influence is now shaping every step of the buying journey, how smart B2B brands are borrowing plays from B2C, and what it really takes to build a creator program that doesn’t flame out on day one. She gets into the messy reality of picking the right creators and measuring impact without deluding yourself with vanity numbers. Head over to exitfive.com/drive to join the waitlist for Drive 2026 and be the first to know when tickets go on sale. Timestamps (00:00) - – Intro (02:23) - – Why Influence Drives Modern B2B Buying (05:18) - – What B2B Can Steal From B2C Playbooks (08:13) - – The Creator Engine Framework (11:30) - – Picking the Right Creators (Without Getting Burned) (14:48) - – Building Campaigns That Don’t Feel Like Ads (18:03) - – How to Measure Real Impact (Not Vanity Metrics) (22:05) - – Running a 90-Day Pilot That Actually Works (24:50) - – Scaling From One-Off Posts to a Full Program Join 50,0000 people who get our Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/ *** Today's episode is brought to you by Knak. Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time. It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience. But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.  That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks. Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

    45 min
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4.6
out of 5
46 Ratings

About

Conversations about marketing and business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, Former CMO). Join the top community for B2B marketers at exitfive.com

Information

  • Creator
    Exit Five
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2025
  • Episodes
    323
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Exit Five
  • Show Website
    The Dave Gerhardt Show

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